It was as a 10-year-old that Noam Chomsky first confronted the perils of foreign aggression. “The first article that I wrote for the elementary school newspaper was on the fall of Barcelona [in 1939],” Chomsky recalls when we speak via video call. It charted the advance of the “grim cloud of fascism” across the world.

“I haven’t changed my opinion since, it’s just gotten worse,” he sardonically remarks. Due to the climate crisis and the threat of nuclear war, Chomsky tells me, “we’re approaching the most dangerous point in human history … We are now facing the prospect of destruction of organised human life on Earth.”

New Statesman